James Kemsley, an actor and cartoonist, had worked on the second Ginger Meggs movie and had comic strip experience drawing the cult strip Frogin' in London for the weekly Australasian Express when he assumed responsibility for the Ginger Meggs comic strip. His first strip appeared in the Sun-Herald on 18 March 1984.
Kemsley's first book, Ginger Meggs at Large, sold over 300,000 copies. Two others followed: It's Sunday, Ginger Meggs and Wakeup, Ginger Meggs. In 1993, seventy two years after its debut as a Sunday strip, Kemsley began a daily version of the strip for the Illawarra Mercury. It was soon picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane's Courier Mail, Perth's West Australian, then in October 1997 by the London Express, and in the USA by the American Publishing Corporation. Its appearance in the Express made it the first Australian daily strip to appear in a British national daily paper. Five annuals of strips have been published.
In 1999, Kemsley and Meggs signed with the US-based Atlantic Syndication for world-wide distrubution .Ginger Meggs went on to appear in over 120 newspapers around Australia and the world. Apart from Australia, Meggs has been read in Fiji, the USA, Antigua, Barbados, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, India, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Canada, Brunei, Sweden, the Netherlands, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Trinadad & Tabago, Jamaica and Thailand.
